Story Time #2

Sex and death in the Dominican Republic

I only ever did Spring Break once. Or rather, it only happened to me one time.

A group of my girlfriends decided to go to Punta Cana for the final break of our college career, the March of senior year. This was 2015, so all of the photos are relics of a specific Millennial moment: trending color block bikinis, silver flash tattoos, bralette tops and gladiator sandals.

It was also three weeks after Jake had died. I had spent two of those weeks getting blackout drunk in Fordham basements and backyards trying to forget it had happened, and the other one in Alameda. At home it was cold and wet. The nights were either for picking up Danny from his house and driving us around in the dark, or for having sad sex with the guy I had been seeing long distance since the holidays, touching each other hesitantly on the bare mattress in his grandparents’ abandoned house in Oakland.

Graduation was looming. Questions about life, both practical and philosophical, were mounting. I was not having fun. I wanted, more than anything, an escape.

I remember landing at the airport in the Dominican Republic and feeling the humid air drifting through the arrivals terminal and feeling like I had been reanimated. A corpse with a fresh pedicure now walking upright, feeling warm again, craving a tropical cocktail in a tall glass. We had booked an all-inclusive resort, not a shabby one, but still we were strapped for cash and crammed ourselves into two rooms, four to a bedroom. Colorful war zones, littered with lace thongs and sheer tops; rough white towels smeared with mascara and foundation; curling irons still plugged in and hot on the sink next to a half-broken Urban Decay Naked eyeshadow palette.

During our five-day occupation, we rotated the same schedule: Buffet breakfast. Drink. Stomach issues from breakfast. Pool. Drink. Drink. Harass men. Lunch. Stomach issues from lunch. Drink in the pool. Shower and beautify. Dinner. Round of shots and Pepto Bismol tablets for the group. Drink. Bus to the club. Stomach issues. Drink. Bus home. Skinny dip at the beach. Bed at 5am. Rinse, repeat.¹

Every single one of us got some form of food poisoning at varying points. And all of us were, objectively, on our worst behavior. We were single and thirsty in an almost sun-poisoned way, drunk on rum in plastic cups and the raw buzz of the white sand and blue ocean. I was suspended in a state of grief that seemed almost liquid; every night I would go to bed blissfully numb and smelling of salt, and every morning I would wake up late from such vivid dreams about death and resurrection that I almost thought about going back to church.

But I didn’t want to think too hard about any of that. I wanted to get blitzed in a bikini and make out with someone who played D3 lacrosse. And I wasn’t alone in that. When we first arrived at the resort, we met a group of good-natured guys from Penn State who indulged our antics—a popular one was trying to convince them that one of us was really into “pterodactyl-ing”—look it up at your own risk! And we all picked our targets, and found the fun we had been seeking.

The first night we went out at the Hard Rock Cafe (lol, lmao even), I spotted the one from the group I thought was cutest—Andrew. We did the usual mating ritual: tequila shots, trying to shout a conversation over the music, and eventually giving up and just making out on the spot. I spent the bus ride back to the resort sitting on his lap, feeling him squeeze my hips every time we hit a bump in the road. I was levitating. It wasn’t until we got back to the resort and stopped into the bathroom before heading down to the beach that I realized anything was wrong.

My friends grabbed me in front of the sink, horrified. “Oh Meg,” they gasped. “How did you let this happen.” I turned and saw what they meant: in the harsh fluorescent lights, it was now obvious I had not one hickey, but an entire collar of giant bruises. Some were red and raw, others were black and blue. They were the size of genetically-modified strawberries. It looked, quite frankly, like someone had choked me—not an ideal visual for parading around a family-friendly resort. The photo was later posted to Facebook with the caption: “Mauled by a bear.”

I laughed it off. It’s Spring Break, baby, and I’m alive! The next night we met the same group of guys out at a different club, and Andrew immediately pulled me in to dance with him. As we started kissing again, a few of my friends jokingly tried to intervene. “Look what you did to her!” they said. “You’re going to kill her!” But we didn’t stop, and when we got home, we went to the water, and lay down on a chaise lounge together. It was dark still, almost morning, and the beach was empty.

There is a strange thing that happens in the immediate aftermath of death, at least in my experiences. When someone close to you dies, the brain can’t process it immediately. But the body knows that something is off. The result, for me, has always been a strange sense of euphoria. Something exciting is happening, the body seems to say. At the same time, you’re receiving an outpouring of love and connection from everyone in your life. It feels overwhelmingly good for a split second until you remember what has happened.

When Jake died I felt this way, because I had no similar experiences of death to compare it to, and in the moment I wanted badly to feel close to the guy I had been seeing long distance for that first semester. He was still in California, had gone to high school with Jake, had been there at Lucky 13 the last night we were all together—he would understand, and he would comfort me.

He didn’t. When I broke the news to him, he sent me brief platitudes over text and never followed up. The euphoria dissipated quickly, and I started to feel a yawning abyss opening up inside me that needed to be fed by something, anything. I went out that first weekend to a DJ event in Manhattan hosted by someone I had dated, who studiously ignored me the entire night. I texted the guy I had been seeing once every hour, getting drunker and more desperate, and never got a response. The next day I apologized for inundating him. Clearly, I said, I had been drunk, and he had been busy. I explained that I was having a little bit of a hard time—it had been a bad week!—and just wanted to talk to him. He seemed confused by this. “Is it the Jake thing?” he asked, as if it were some fleeting inconvenience: a bad grade on a test, a date that didn’t go as planned. Things fizzled out between us shortly after.

But that early morning on the beach, after weeks of numbing myself, I started to feel a whisper of that euphoria again. Not because I was blissfully unaware of what had happened, and not because I had gotten over it. But because every time I have been closest to Death, I have also felt closest to Life. The veil, lifting. Something cracks open in you. Andrew and I had slow sex on a lounge chair in front of the ocean as the sun rose above the mountains, painting the sky cotton candy pink and gold, and I remember thinking I had not felt so alive in the entire 22 years of my life. This had been the connection I needed—not a text back, not the half-hearted attention of a man determined to misunderstand me. Just someone’s skin on mine, the ocean, the sunrise, the possibility of life going on despite, well, everything.

The beach, however, was not empty as we had thought. Somewhere down the way I knew friends of mine were also having sex (let’s go girls!), but I hadn’t expected middle aged and elderly couples to be up and taking a stroll at dawn, one of which happened upon our chair just as the sun was properly coming out. We were mid-thrust. It was daylight. And I was topless. The four of us collectively startled, and Andrew and I immediately grabbed our clothes and raced for our rooms.

The Penn State boys left that day, which made us sad for the length of a single afternoon. We were saved by a fresh crop of victims, a larger group from The College of New Jersey. We attacked once they got into the pool, co-opting their beer bong to take turns guzzling daiquiris through the hose. They were a fun new distraction, but they couldn’t quite keep up with us the same way the other group had, and they kept getting confused by simple drinking games (ten rounds of “Cheers to the Governor” finally abandoned because they couldn’t manage to count to 21). Half of the group warmed to us, and were clearly interested, but some of the others were aloof and standoffish, hot guys who knew they were hot and didn’t want to grace us with their attention.

But I was electrified with a newfound confidence. I had come close to death and lived; I had come back to life and quite literally grabbed it by the balls. I still had faded hickeys on my neck and a UTI brewing. I felt unstoppable.

“These guys think they’re such hot shit,” I said to my friends later that night. “Who cares? It’s like, okay, well we fucked a group of guys from Penn State, and we’ll fuck you too.”

1. Notable events not mentioned include:
-The night two of the group missed the bus back from the club and had to take a taxi, didn’t have cash, and were chased by the driver and nearly arrested.

-The night we all missed the bus to the club and got a resort concierge, Luis, who we had been mercilessly flirting with all week, to drive us in his car. He took us around the DR in a beat-up Honda bumping music while we drank vodka out of plastic water bottles in the back seat. I remember the friend sitting up front next to him reached over to stroke his neck, saying, “Luis do you ever cheat on your wife?”